More Chrono Trigger Revealed

I wrote a long time ago in It’s A Binary World 1.0 about all of the symbolism in Chrono Trigger. That game was extremely deep for a video game, but Square (now Square-Enix) has been known to have some very intellectual aspects to their games. Before, I spoke of Massamune, the gurus of time, and how certain aspects of the game spoke to racism. This time I uncovered another metaphor in the video game by watching a movie.

Yesterday I saw Constantine. I didn’t know until yesterday that it was based upon comic books. The movie was ok, perhaps 6 out of 10, but I’m not a big fan of movies about the occult. It’s not so much that I find them evil or blasphemous, they’re just not my bag. At any rate, I learned yesterday that, according to occult teachings, Satan has a son. I’ve never heard anything like this at church or even in religous books before. Personally, I find it a bit silly because I think it takes the dichotemy too far. God is good and Satan is evil. God lives above and Satan below. God has a son, so Satan must also? I don’t know, it seems a bit weird to me; a bit too contrived. But I digress…

Apparently Satan’s son is named Mammon. Any devout player of Chrono Trigger such as my brothers and I would have felt something resonate in them upon hearing that name. When I first heard it during the movie I kept trying to remember why that name was familiar to me. At first I thought it had to do with Revalations, but then I remembered that at Gog and Magog. I remained stumped for quite some time. Then it suddenly came to me, Schala was using the Mammon machine to summon forth Lavos’ power. The effect of this on her was to make her evil and, although I haven’t played the game in ages so I can’t remember for sure, demonic. It makes sense now for the machine to be called the Mammon machine because, by summoning Lavos, she was, in effect, summoning forth the son of Satan. It was that event which began the chain of events leading to destruction in 1999, in the game’s timeline.

While I’m at it, I think I wrote about this before, but I can’t remember – it is obviously symbollic that Square chose 1999 as the time for the catastrophic events in the game. I remember even those who didn’t express concern over the year 2000 still having some thoughts in the back of their mind, wondering if 31 Dec 1999 would be their last day. Also, I know there is a creature in the game called a Golem, which I recently found out is a Hebrew mythological creature. Next time I play through the game I’ll have to take notice of what the Golem is and then see how that matches up to the Jewish creature.